Malayalam
Type	Abugida
Spoken languages	Malayalam Konkani
Time period	c. 1100–present
Parent systems	Proto-Canaanite alphabet  → Phoenician alphabet   → Aramaic alphabet    → Brāhmī     → Grantha      → Malayalam
Sister systems	Sinhala Tamil
Unicode range	U+0D00–U+0D7F
ISO 15924	Mlym
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

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This article contains Indic text. Without rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes or other symbols instead of Indic characters; or irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts.

The Malayalam script is an abugida of the Brahmic family, used to write the Malayalam language. From the Brahmi script, the Grantha script emerged as one of the earliest Southern scripts. It further evolved into the Malayalam script. The Malayalam script covers all the symbols of Sanskrit as well as special Dravidian letters. The alphabet is classified into two categories: swarams (or vowels) and vyanjanams (or consonants).

Vowels

Consonants

Picture showing the relation of Malayalam to Brahmi

There is no distinction of case, i.e. no uppercase and lowercase letters. Diacritics, or vowel signs, are used to associate a vowel to a consonant. When no diacritic is used, the vowel sound 'a' is assumed. To denote the absence of a vowel specifically, a chandrakkala ് (also called virama) is used.

Other symbols

In addition to these symbols, there are many more symbols to indicate ligatures of the various consonants with each other.

Digits

Malayalam digits are written as follows:

Unicode for Malayalam

The Unicode range for Malayalam is U+0D00–U+0D7F. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.

See also

• List of alphabets
• Grantha script
• Arabi Malayalam

External links

• Website including resources for learning Malayalam script
• Unicode Code Chart for Malayalam (PDF Format)
• Malayalam Unicode fonts
• Indian Language Converter Web-based tool to transliterate from Romanised English to Unicode Malayalam
• 'moodle' in Malayalam Virtual Learning Environment